HMS Hardy (F54): The First Type 14 Frigate, Sunk by Exocet and Sea Skua

The First of Her Type

HMS Hardy, named like every other ship to carry the name after Thomas Masterman Hardy, Nelson's own flag captain aboard HMS Victory at Trafalgar, was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders, with construction beginning on 4 February 1953 and launched on 25 November that year, holding the distinction of being the very first Type 14 Blackwood-class frigate completed for the Royal Navy, the lead ship of a class of purpose-built anti-submarine escorts.

She displaced 1,456 tons at full load, measured 310 feet in length and could reach 27 knots, with a complement of 112 and an armament of three 40mm Bofors guns alongside two Limbo Mark 10 anti-submarine mortars, a notably focused design built around one job, hunting Soviet submarines, rather than trying to be a jack of all trades.

Being first of class is a distinction with a sting in it. The lead ship of any class is the one the drawings are proved on, which means she goes to sea with the errors still in her and spends her early years being measured, adjusted and argued about while the yard incorporates the findings into everybody else. The Type 14 was an unusually austere design to begin with, a deliberate economy that gave up half the machinery, one of the two shafts and very nearly all the gun armament in order to buy twelve hulls instead of six, and what the Admiralty gained and lost by that bargain is set out in the article on HMS Blackwood (F78). Hardy was the first of them into the water and the first to be handed over, and the eleven that followed her were better ships for it.

She was formally acquired by the Royal Navy on 8 December 1955 and commissioned that same month, on 15 December.

The man behind the name is remembered for four words and had rather more to him than that. Thomas Masterman Hardy was Nelson's flag captain at Trafalgar and was on the quarterdeck when Nelson was shot, but he was thirty-six at the time and lived another thirty-four years. A baronetcy followed in 1806. He commanded on the South America station from 1819 to 1824, at a moment when half the continent was in revolt against Spain and a British commodore had to decide daily whose ships he would protect and whose he would not. He became First Sea Lord in 1830 and a vice admiral in 1837. From 1834 until his death he was Governor of Greenwich Hospital, the great home for old and injured seamen, where by every account he was conspicuously decent to the pensioners and pushed through a string of improvements to how they were treated. He died on 20 September 1839 and is buried in the mausoleum in the hospital grounds, and because he had no son the baronetcy died with him. The Royal Navy has been putting his name on ships ever since.

The Hardy immediately before this one had about as short and as violent a career as a ship can have. She was a destroyer leader, and on the morning of 10 April 1940 Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee took her and four others up Ofotfjord in a snowstorm to attack a very much larger German force that had just seized Narvik. He led Hardy, Hunter and Havock straight into the harbour at about half past four in the morning, sank two German destroyers, went out, and went in again. On the way out the second time the surviving German ships caught them. Hunter was sunk. Hardy was shot to pieces and run aground in flames to save what was left of her people, and Warburton-Lee was killed on his own bridge; his final signal was "Continue to engage the enemy". He was given the first Victoria Cross gazetted in the Second World War. That is the ship whose name this frigate took up thirteen years later.

Three Decades of Steady Service

HMS Hardy served initially with the Third Training Squadron at Londonderry, before transferring to Portland in 1957, and underwent modernisation in 1960 that saw her join the Twentieth Frigate Squadron. She moved again in 1967, this time to the Second Frigate Squadron, and that year put in an appearance at Portsmouth Navy Days, the Royal Navy's long-running open-to-the-public showcase.

The postings that follow read like a list and are in fact a description of the entire British anti-submarine effort. Londonderry meant the Joint Anti-Submarine School on the Foyle, where ships, submarines and aircraft were put in the same water to teach each other; Portland meant Flag Officer Sea Training and the establishment that decided whether a warship was fit to join the fleet at all. Between them those two places absorbed the working lives of a generation of small escorts, and what went on at each is described in the article on HMS Grafton (F51). A Type 14 was very good at exactly one thing, and both establishments existed to make the rest of the Navy good at it too.

Through the 1970s she carried out Exclusive Economic Zone patrols, part of the Royal Navy's ongoing responsibility for protecting British fishing and offshore interests, and attended the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead in 1977, a proud moment for a frigate by then already well into her third decade of service.

Her front-line career wound down not long after: she paid off to the Standby Squadron in August 1977, returned briefly to operational service at Portland, and by October 1979 had been reassigned to the rather less glamorous role of stores accommodation ship at Portsmouth.

The Standby Squadron was one of the quieter symptoms of a navy running short of money and people. Ships in it were not in commission and not quite laid up either: they lay in the basins, chiefly at Chatham, kept at varying degrees of notice by small working parties rather than a ship's company, machinery turned over, hull maintained, available in theory if a crisis produced the men to man them. It was a way of keeping hulls on the list without paying for them. In practice very few ever came back, and for most it was a waiting room. Hardy went in during August 1977, came out briefly for Portland, and by October 1979 was tied up at Portsmouth as an accommodation and stores hulk, which is the point at which a ship stops being a ship and becomes a building that floats.

Sunk by Exocet and Sea Skua

HMS Hardy's final chapter began in 1983, when she was selected as a target vessel for a Sinking Exercise, or SINKEX, in the Western Approaches, a live-fire test used to evaluate the real-world destructive power of modern anti-ship weapons against an actual warship hull rather than a theoretical target.

The timing of what happened to her next is the whole point of it. In 1982 the Royal Navy had lost four warships and two support ships in the South Atlantic and had watched several others burn, and a great deal of what it thought it knew about modern weapons had turned out to be theory. Nobody had ever fired an Exocet at a British warship before Sheffield, and nobody had any real idea what one did on arrival, or how a fire behaved in a modern hull, or which of the assumptions in the damage control manual were sound. So in 1983 the fleet took an obsolete frigate out into the Western Approaches and shot at her properly, with the actual weapons, to find out. The findings went directly into the next generation: the Type 23 that followed relocated its crew living spaces, changed its fire extinction arrangements, redesigned its ventilation zoning so that smoke could be contained, and was given a vertical launch Sea Wolf system so that it could defend itself rather than relying on somebody else. Why navies do this at all is set out in the article on HMS Galatea (F18).

She was struck first, in July 1983, by a live Exocet fired from the frigate HMS Charybdis, one of at least two Royal Navy ships, alongside HMS Broadsword, to test-fire missiles into her hull over the course of the trial, before Sea Skua strikes and torpedo hits, the very weapons that had proven so devastating during the Falklands War the previous year, blew off her bow entirely.

Further shelling and mortar charges followed over the months after, and it was not until 3 July 1984, the best part of a year after that first Exocet strike, that both the main section of the ship and her separated bow were finally sent to the bottom by 20mm cannon fire, fittingly, from HMS Charybdis once again, a thorough and rather sobering end for the first ship of her class, one that took the Royal Navy considerably longer to finish than any of the weapons involved were ever meant to need, and whose own hull ultimately helped it understand exactly what those weapons could do to a steel warship.

The most instructive thing about the whole exercise is how long it took. An Exocet in July 1983, Sea Skua strikes, torpedo hits that took her bow clean off, then months of shelling and mortar charges, and she was still there; it was 3 July 1984, the best part of a year later, before 20mm cannon fire finally put the two halves of her under. That is not a failure of the weapons. It is the central lesson of the Falklands stated in the plainest possible terms: modern anti-ship missiles are designed to stop a warship fighting, not to break her in half, and a steel hull with her compartments shut will stay afloat through a quite extraordinary amount of punishment. Sheffield burned for six days before she sank under tow. Glamorgan took an Exocet, got her fires out in a few hours and stayed in the fight. What kills a ship of this kind is almost never the explosion; it is the fire afterwards, and the question of whether her people can get on top of it. Hardy spent her last year proving that on behalf of everybody who came after her.